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The Mail Must Get Through

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Since 1993 I'd been running the technical side of a small free-access Internet service provider called Chester County InterLink (CCIL) in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I co-founded CCIL and wrote our unique multiuser bulletin-board software—you can check it out by telnetting to locke.ccil.org. Today it supports almost three thousand users on thirty lines. The job allowed me 24-hour-a-day access to the net through CCIL's 56K line—in fact, the job practically demanded it! I had gotten quite used to instant Internet email. I found having to periodically telnet over to locke to check my mail annoying. What I wanted was for my mail to be delivered on snark (my home system) so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools. The Internet's native mail forwarding protocol, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), wouldn't suit, because it works best when machines are connected full-time, while my personal machine isn't always on the Internet, and doesn't have

The Mail Must Get Through The Mail Must Get Through Prev � � � Next The Mail Must Get Through Since 1993 I'd been running the technical side of a small free-access Internet service provider called Chester County InterLink (CCIL) in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I co-founded CCIL and wrote our unique multiuser bulletin-board software—you can check it out by telnetting to locke.ccil.org . Today it supports almost three thousand users on thirty lines. The job allowed me 24-hour-a-day access to the net through CCIL's 56K line—in fact, the job practically demanded it! I had gotten quite u

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